Afghanistan: The Taliban’s bloody resurgence

America’s “other” war is looking more and more like the main event, said USA Today in an editorial. While the situation in Iraq continues to improve—albeit with maddening slowness—the picture in Afghanistan is darkening rapidly. The Taliban and al Qaida have regrouped, their numbers swollen with new recruits, while the weak Afghan government grows ever more precarious. Suicide- and car-bombings are on the rise, and this week, in the deadliest single attack on U.S. forces since 2005, militants armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades launched a furious attack on a U.S. outpost in Kunar province, killing nine American soldiers. None of this would be happening, said The New York Times, if President Bush hadn’t siphoned away troops and resources from Afghanistan to launch his “disastrous war of choice in Iraq.” The time has come to send our troops back to where they should

have been all along: in Afghanistan, fighting the people who attacked us on 9/11.

Who says we must choose? said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. A “liberal consensus” is emerging that “we can only face our enemies in one place at a time,” and we should therefore end the Bad War in Iraq and send all our troops to the Good War in Afghanistan. Needless to say, things aren’t quite that simple. Many of the people we’re fighting in Iraq—such as “the horrific but now deceased Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”—also fought us in Afghanistan; for Islamic terrorists, this is a war with many fronts. For another thing, “many of the most successful drives against the Taliban have been conducted by American forces redeployed from Iraq,” using counterinsurgent tactics learned in the streets of Baghdad and Anbar province. In other words, those who would “play off the two wars against each other” are engaging in “a small-minded and zero-sum exercise” that bears little relation to the actual world.

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But one lesson both these wars have taught us, said Fran Quigley in the Indianapolis Star, is that military power has its limits. In Afghanistan, the Taliban resurgence is being fueled partly by resentment of U.S. airstrikes, which have killed scores of innocent Afghan civilians. When we kill and terrorize civilians, it actually creates sympathy and legitimacy for Islamic extremists. So why are Americans arguing over which war deserves more troops? Afghanistan, like Iraq, will be stabilized mostly by smart economic, diplomatic, and political tactics—not by more troops, more firefights, and more bombing raids.